And Now for a Word on Backwards Compatibility (Part 2)

And now to end my two-part blog post on the importance of backwards compatibility in gaming by addressing the most common argument against it: that it's unnecessary because those older games we love so much can still be played, all we have to do is purchase the proper console. Sure, the Wii U can't play Gamecube games like the Wii, but that's okay--just buy a Gamecube! Sure, the Playstation 3 can't play PS2 games, but that's okay--just buy a PS2! The problem with this argument is that it's based around an assumption that, frankly, is wrong. Here, once again, we are relying on an invalid assumption. In this case that it's possible to purchase older iterations of console hardware. But is it? The Gamecube and Playstation 2 are no longer in production, and they have not been in production for several years. As a consequence, they are no longer sold in retail stores and no longer available -anywhere- new. If you want one, you have to go out of your way to a gaming specialty store or the Internet to purchase one used.

In our immediate world, this is not much of an issue. But the Gamecube and Playstation 2 are only a single generation removed from our present. What if we go back one generation? Or two? Or Three? What happens when we want to play Nintendo 64 games? Or Super Nintendo games? Or Nintendo games? Do we go out and buy an N64, a SNES or a NES? Of course not. They stopped making those things years and years and years ago. So long ago that many of them have been tossed aside into a rubbish pile, been broken or fallen into disrepair. Scarcity being what it is, we are forced to find alternatives, either playing those games legitimately through emulator services like Nintendo's infrequently-updated Virtual Console, or resorting to pirating those games (which is, you know, illegal) to play on PC emulators. That the same fate will soon fall upon the games of our current generation is not a question, it is an inevitability. One made worse by one simple truism: the more complex an electronic device becomes, the more likely it will suffer catastrophic failure. The reason you can still, conceivably purchase a used SNES on Ebay is because the SNES was a very simple electronic device. Is the PS3 simple? Of course not. Ask yourself this: of all the Playstation 3s and Xbox 360s manufactured in 2006, how many of them are still fully functional today? What percentage do you think that number amounts to? And what will happen to those figures tomorrow, or next year?

And, almost by accident, we've stumbled upon what may be the single greatest problem effecting the gaming industry: preservation. Think about it. Look at the worlds of art, music, cinema, literature. What do they all have in common? A shared, cherished history. We still know the names of Michelangelo, Vang Gogh and Da Vinci; of Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff; of Hitchcock, Scorsese and Spielberg; of Shakespeare, Hemingway and Dickens. We know these people, we know their work. Even after decades and centuries we can picture their faces, see their art, hear their music, experience their unique vision and witness the literal expression of their souls. The great artistic classics of humanity have been preserved for posterity, and we are all the richer for it.

But not all those classics have been saved. Perhaps you've heard of the Library of Alexandria? In the ancient world, it was a beacon of knowledge. Countless scrolls were preserved in the library--and all of them are now lost to us. Burned in Caesar's fire and gone now, forever. So much literature has perished from the world because for so long, for years and decades and centuries, no one grasped the importance of preservation. Western civilization fell into the Dark Ages, a period ruled by superstition, ignorance and fear because the people were unable to preserve the knowledge and wisdom of the past. The great rebirths of humanity, the renaissances were only possible through the rediscovery of those ancient works, carefully preserved through the ages by small communities of dedicated monks. But they could only preserve so much, and most of what once was written has vanished from the earth like so much dust in the wind. Every other artistic medium has suffered the same fate. Early Christians defaced art in a misguided attempt to conceal elements deemed incorrect, utterly destroying works deemed heretical. We have no music (not at all) from before the 15th century, because there was no unified system for musical notation, and what notation did exist we no longer know how to read. Paintings and books have been ripped and burned by the billion. With so much artistic achievement lost forever, surely humans would have learned the importance of preservation?

But we didn't. We never do, because we don't respect new artistic mediums. Just as a debate exists (it actually exists!) today over whether or not games are art, a century or so ago when cinema was the new artistic media, it, too, was scorned for its perceived lack of artistic integrity. Countless early films were either destroyed when their use was over, or stashed away in storage, forgotten. So much of cinematic history is gone because a century ago no one thought it was worth preserving. A half-century ago, television grew big and quickly suffered the same. Countless television shows are gone now. Doctor Who is currently one of the most popular science-fiction franchises in the world, second only to Star Wars and Star Trek. It has been on the air since 1963, and is currently (50 years later) enjoying the height of its popularity.

But it is not complete. Whole episodes from those early years are gone. Missing. Lost. They no longer exist. This is a tragedy and a travesty and a fate that has already claimed countless games. Our hobby is a new one. It has only existed for a few decades. With the Internet, we like to think that anything that exists, will exist forever. That uploading is somehow analogous to carving a thing in stone on the side of a mountain. But it's not. Many of the earliest games are gone, forever. I grew up with gaming, almost literally. The earliest games I played were simple affairs stored on enormous floppy disks. Most gamers don't know what those are these days (they were so big you could flop them up and down, which was often as fun or more fun than the actual games they contained). I had to learn tedious boot commands to load the games in MS-DOS. They were simple games, consisting of crude pictures drawn with garish green pixels on a black screen. They taught me simple math. They taught me how to read. Those games no longer exist. Countless titles more recent, too, have perished. And gaming suffers from another, more unique problem: of those few games who have been preserved, are they all the same? Many classic games have been ported to other consoles in an effort to preserve them, but in that process much has been changed. Is Silent Hill 2 the same experience on the PS3 that it was on the PS2? Does the iOS version of Final Fantasy III produce the same experience as the NES version? Be wary, for we are rapidly approaching a future where the great classics of our medium--the Final Fantasies, the Dragon Quests, the Baldur's Gates, the Fallouts, the Chrono Triggers, the Zeldas--are either lost forever to time, or only partially preserved in a new format that doesn't quite manage to convey the original experience.

And make no mistake, as has been the case with every artistic medium of the past, with sculpture and painting and music, with literature and cinema and television, those precious few items which are preserved will represent the vast, vast minority. So the issue here, really, is a broad one that stretches far beyond the concept of gaming alone, or even art in general. It's a question of culture. Does culture matter? Does history matter? Does human civilization--does humanity itself--possess any real merit? Would we, as a species, be better off--would our souls be any richer--without Final Fantasy VI? Without Dragon Quest VIII? Without Shadows of Amn, or Planescape Torment, or Grim Fandango, or Monkey Island, or the Ocarina of Time, or Mario?

These are questions I don't need to answer.

So do me a favor, would you? The next time you wander into a conversation about next Playstation, or whatever, and the issue of backwards compatibility comes up--the next time you see a rumor that the next Playstation might not be able to play PS1, PS2 or PS3 games, or hear someone say, "that's okay--just buy a PS1, a PS2 and a PS3," stop for a bit and and think and remember and respond not with vitriol or passivity, but with patience, intellect and the desire to elucidate. If we stop demanding the ability to play those older games, we will eventually lose that ability and in time those older games will disappear. Backwards compatibility matters, it matters a lot. We are gamers and it is quite literally our shared cultural heritage. We owe it to ourselves--and to our children--to do all that we can to ensure the preservation this new, fantastic art form, so that the greatest master works of the medium may never be forgotten.

i keep a dos pc around for games that do not run under windows xp or even windows 95. Not to mention i have pc parts specific to those games because you just cant play them any other way.

3dfx voodoo was the beast of its day. Those games that take advantage of this old hardware pale in comparison with today but it is a reminder (for me) of where things came from. So many today probably never heard let alone played a game that used GLide but it was something to behold for its time.

At least with console games, the preservation is taking shape with digital emulations and or the VC that was mentioned. There isnt any such thing in place for old school pc games.

I really don't know how some people can forget about old games that easily and just play new games all the time. And the worst thing is that when a game becomes old its price skyrockets to the moon and it becomes next to impossible to get ahold of a copy, even used! Example? Suikoden II. I'm still dying to play the game but I don't want to pay like $200 for a used copy nor play it through an emulator!

And the thing is that if I wanted to watch an old movie like Blade Runner I can still buy it anywhere for cheap! Why can't be the same with games? And these days devs aren't helping the case much either by introducing the pesky online passes.

BTW good blog! Preservation of games is important but no one seems to care. This just shows how immature and young the media and its audience are. Soon they all will learn!

the fac the older gme is expensive is more to do with its availability. The game you mentioned is not common. It can be found in digital form but the price is more for the collector side not the practical game player side.

The example of blade runner falls into the same situation. yes you can find it "re-released" on bluray or digital but to collectors, something like the laserdisc version is worth much more because of its rarity.

Keep in mind there are collectors who only seek the originals and there are the rest who just want a copy for themselves no matter if its used or a reissue.

reissues arent worth nearly as much as originals. I am such a person who is an old school collector and have many rare original items in my collection.

Thats why emulation initally came about, the original purpose of emulators was to accurately document and emulate the original hardware right down to the very last CPU instruction. In software terms, legacy applications would need to be ported to newer hardware so that older hardware needed to be emulated to run the legacy app.

The simple fact is that the original hardware will vanish over time due to collectors, broken kit or simply be thrown away. Emulation allows legacy hardware/software to run on modern machines so that is isn't forgotten or lost.

It's become a bit skewed over time but the basic ideology of emulation (for gamers at least) is actually the preservation of old games and hardware.

Being a game collector, I can say that this generation has made collecting go to shambles. I believe that gaming can be an art form, however this generation, more than any in the past, it's the actual publishers who are making the art seem like it's nothing but business. Things like Online passes, DRM, online servers shutting down, day one updates, and even DLC, means that these games were not meant to be cherished for the long term. The truth of the matter is that publishers simply do not want you playing older games. They've already made their money (or lost it) on the game, and they want you to purchase the next big thing...to hopefully make them more money.

There are many like me who love to go back and play an old game, either because we appreciate gaming or because of nostalgia. Unfortunately it's not viable to keep producing a game indefinitely, or re-release most games, like the movie market. Today's game player overall just wants the biggest and shiniest thing. Even re-releases need to be remastered in HD to really get any attention. On top of that, digital versions of all these old games can do quite well, and most HD collections have. This only means that a console manufacturer is even less likely to put in BC because there is more money to be made by re-releasing some of the best of the best...even if it is less than 1% of the total number of games released.

That being said, gaming will never be seen as an art form outside of those of us who know it can be. Publisher's business practices make it very apparent that they do not consider it an art form, so why should the general public. With movies it became an art form before the modern day product placement and tie-ins, so the art was there before the money. With gaming it's the exact opposite. Gaming is at that age where it's becoming widely accepted as an entertainment medium, but art form it is not. Unless the industry as a whole treats it as such, and does many of the things mentioned in this blog, it will continue to remain as such.

On a Different note, If you go and put the average game player today in front of say Pac-Man, the original Ninja Gaiden, any NES Mario game, or countless others from the early generations of gaming, they will probably really enjoy it. Those games relied on fun and challenge, and not supped up graphics and pulse pounding action that is so prevalent in today's gaming.

Also..good blog. Glad to find some like minded people who can see the bigger picture when it comes to gaming as a whole, and not just what's hot right now.

I love old school games. Sometimes I get a burnout from the newer games and get into a rut where I won't play anything for a long time. A lot of the times when I feel those moments coming on, I'll play older games like some SNES games on an emulator, or PS1 games as well. Hell, I'll even go back and play NES games too. It's good to go back every now and then, some of those games have ideas that are superior to the stuff we see today.